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MIT To Make All Faculty Publications Open Access
Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica:
"If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access."
This should put to rest any concerns that closed access journals protect the interests of the authors.
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This is a major blow to an industry with an outdated business model. Scientific publication is starting to move beyond the need for the middleman, and I am extremely glad to see it happen.
That said, the major publishers will scramble to try and patch this hole in the business model, and they will probably make the overall situation worse before it really starts to improve.
Oh well. Got to start that process at some point. Go MIT.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
As much as I congratulate MIT on this, I'd be interested to see the official vote tally. MIT's faculty is rather largeish, and the article itself says that faculty are caught in the middle between the need for funding and the need for exposure. There's no way in hell that vote was unanimous. Sounds more like the motion passed by a simple majority, someone introduced one of those silly, "Motion to declare the outcome of this vote unanimous," motions, which was then passed by the same people. That's just speculation, but seriously...not one single dissenter on the entire faculty? No way.
Many of the professors I know of host copies of their publications on their lab websites for all to view. Perhaps this decision by MIT is the first of its type officially, but it's hardly new.
It's about time that publicly funded research make it back into the public domain. I'm sick and tired of my tax money going to enriching institutions of higher learning, and big Pharma (and other corporations) and seeing nothing in return but more generally useless, largely unnecessary, and unjustifiably expensive drugs, not to mention huge salaries.
Running journals costs a lot of money and a lot of peoples time. You need editors to go over papers and to submit them to referees. Then you need editors to harass referees who aren't reviewing things in a timely fashion. Then you need editors to work with authors to make sure that everything in the paper is presented well. This is a lot of time and aggravation. If you aren't paying people to do this (as you get with a journal that is subscription) you either need to a) have a pay for review cost which creates a serious barrier for authors who are amateurs or are from schools with less funding or b) get volunteers to do thankless, time-consuming work, which is hard to do (working as an editor isn't something that helps get tenure that much). So yes, there are definite advantages to the closed source model.
I'd buy point (a) if there wasn't a practice of journals charging authors for the ability to publish (which they pay in order to continue to have a career). I'd agree with point (b) if the peer reviewers were paid. There may be advantages to the closed source model, but neither of those are it.
I am officially gone from
Standard? No. And as there's no standard way for how a web page should be organised, there's no standard way to find such articles, and no guarantee that they won't disappear tomorrow. Would you take the chance to cite a paper that's not even properly published?
MIT's decision will hopefully mean that you'll find the electronic version through the library's database, with persistent links that don't disappear when a professor moves to a different university.
Computer and engineering journals are fairly receptive to open publication. However, the medical journal industry is viciously protective. Pre-publication of articles threatens rejection and potential loss of priority rights. A lot of this is due to biotech which seeks to keep new technology hidden as long as possible. A number of people with fatal illness have complained to congressmen about the difficulty of accessing research on their diseases.
for computer science I would say yes rice is a better option.
do undergrad there, save the money, then go on to master and postdoc
at either stanford or MIT.
If I could walk that way I wouldnt need cologne.
As opposed to the comp sci major unwashed stereotype? :-)
My experience has been that there are different tiers. Schools within a given tier are going to have comparable program quality (but one's style might match you better). Generally speaking, going to any school within the top 50 or 100 for a field will result in a good education. Also, some schools are higher in their ranks because of their research. However, graduate students benefit from this far more than undergrad students do.
I will say this, though. Being in the real world with a lot less college debt is nice.
I'm quite happy with the current system, warts and all -- we pay the journals to do the insanely laborious task of filtering through all the submissions and providing us with a reasonable subset that represent (with some measurement error) the most salient works.
Do you? Or do you pay journal to organize unpaid reviewers to determine the quality of submissions, and to cover the cost of distribution? Because I thought that most reviewers and editors don't get paid.
The point is that now distribution costs can be close to nil, but subscription prices keep increasing. I don't see why an open-access journal that was not affiliated with a commercial publisher could not accomplish the same thing, and maintain the quality of articles. The "imprimatur" will simply no longer come courtesy of a commercial publisher - the brand name, e.g., "Well-Respected Journal of X" can persist. After all, it is not the publisher that provides the quality, but the editors and reviewers.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
WTF? You're complaining that they don't have infinite capacity? There's a limit to how many professors and classrooms even a $45K tuition can buy, you know!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
One can argue that this is a stew of the publishers' own making. When you charge on the order of $20-30+ to receive a copy of a single article (which presumably costs pennies to distribute) then you are asking for a backlash. I applaud MIT for stepping up to the plate and suggest that the other Ivy League schools do so as well. Though the PLoS work which I believe is largely based at Stanford suggests that this is already in progress.
Even PNAS is slowly increasing its public access articles (and with acknowledgement, their archives are largely open). So the public (and students) have much more access to scientific information than they once did. This does not however keep some publishing groups (e.g. Nature) from going in different directions. It appears to me as if Nature is on a path of only publishing commissioned articles [1] for review which may be very difficult for University's or Government's to regulate.
I would challenge Nature's publishers -- here and in public -- "When and how do you intend to implement an open access policy?"
1. It could be argued that Science is only a step behind.
More universities MUST join this. Preferably, a number of state universities. At that point, congressmen will have a difficult time saying no to this.
IMHO, now that it is started, evolutionary pressure comes into play.
Those who publish their works online, quickly, with broad access, will be more available for reference from other works, compared to those who wait for journal publication. Their good works will get a higher citation rate and sometimes priority. Such feathers in their cap will selectively advance their careers and retard those of their journal-publishing peers. (Just as journal publishing replaced things like anagram-publication to claim priority without actually making the work public.)
This will work even better if the peer-review function can be disconnected from the print-journal publication and ported to an electronic publication model. That would avoid burying the respectable work in the chaff and aid in search filtering as well as re-enabling the manual method at electronic network, rather than print library, speeds.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Have you submitted an article to a peer-reviewed scientific journal? Have you been a referee for such an article? I have been in both roles, and more than once. Your view of an editor's work is not consistent with my experiences.
As a referee, I was never harassed by an editor. At first, they simply ask if you're willing to referee a paper, and ask you to suggest a different referee if you are unwilling to be referee yourself. If you accept, you're expected to give a reasoned assessment of the article within a few weeks. They typically use several referees, so if there's a laggard, it does not matter. Most referees are conscientious and timely (I and my colleagues are).
As an author, you are expected to follow the guidelines which the journal publishes. Most of them provide LaTeX or Word templates, and strict typesetting guidelines on figures, headings, citations, captions, etc. If you don't follow their guidelines, your article will be rejected by a secretary who will politely provide the formatting guidelines. It won't even reach the editor and certainly won't go out for peer review.
Oh, I also know editors of a few journals personally (including two journals I have published in, but I met the editors long afterwards at conferences). None of them ever mentioned any need for harassment of authors or referees. They did need to harass their own employees (fill the advertising space, dammit!) and subcontractors (this is printed on SC paper, I said to use coated stock!). That's where the time is spent.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
If I were a publisher, I'd want the smartest minds in the world to publish in my journal.
I'm sure people would want to read what the geniuses at MIT are doing, and the publishers will have to choose between losing subscribers or making the requirements more lax.
MIT's one of the few schools in the world that can pull off something like this. Most people choose schools because of rankings, and rankings are mostly based on the number of publications, so schools are not very likely to risk lowering their ranking for an ideology. But MIT doesn't care. No one would pay any college ranking that doesn't end with MIT or Caltech.
At least in the humanities none of these really apply. Editors don't get paid. They get to put a line on their CV that said they were an editor. It counts as part of their tenure (not as much as publishing but it counts).
In almost all journals you have to subscribe to it in order to get your paper published.
You also almost always have to sign away your rights to that intellectual property. If you want to go back to that paper and turn it into a book? You have to get permission from the publisher.
Your university wants to make it available to everyone affiliated with the university? The library has to pay to get access to it. So the university (in part, in addition to teaching and such) is paying you to write the paper and get it published and then they are paying a company to get access to it. Of course they get access to lots of other journals too.
there are few if any good reasons for academic publishing to stay closed.
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But I worry about the precedent for academic freedom.
The fact that I can find all the world's knowledge online except academic publications is far worse! The purpose of a Univeristy is to increase the knowledge available to mankind. Various sorts of academic freedom are important for that goal, but that freedom is a means, not the goal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not to rain on your tirade, but this policy was UNANIMOUSLY approved by the same faculty it would effect. Perhaps the, very bright, faculty of MIT actually liked the policy and felt it was fair to everyone. Perhaps they considered what you have said, and found that the policy was fair or that your issues were unfounded. Somehow, I think that the faculty of MIT understand the ramifications of this policy and feel that it is 'good'.
Not a whole lot can be said against any restrictive policy that has the unanimous support of all of those the policy restricts.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Since there is open access, i think the faculty can try publishing at that journal. If that journal asks them to sign over their rights to the publication, they won't be able to.
So actually the journal is preventing them from publishing, not MIT. In fact depending on how open the paper is, can't the journals just reprint the paper?